The dreaming started again, the very first night after. He slept in the only patch of trees he found, a spindly group of yellow pines huddled in the corner of a soybean field. The ground between them was shot through with blackberry bramble and poison ivy, but he felt hidden from the relentless ribbon of blacktop; as soon as it was full dark, sleep took him like an angel of mercy. His right hand covered the place in the center of his chest where he imagined Hope had pierced him, where he imagined all his dignity was seeping out between his fingers as he slept. He shivered, remembering the coldspark flash of her eyes as she snatched her hand away from his.
In the humid blackness, he dreamed himself far down the mirthless belt of roadway; however far he might have been, though, there was no end to the blanket of agriculture spreading out on either side of the blacktop. Corn, soybeans, tobacco and cotton alternated to form a choking patchwork of green that left him disoriented and constantly scanning the horizon for landmarks. Here and there, rusting machinery that once groomed the fields settled down into the soil an inch at a time. He dreamwalked past these with the uneasy sensation that some bailer or harrow was going to lurch out of the ground and heave itself at him.
In a bare patch of dirt carved out of a cotton field, a small house had been reduced to a jumble of kindling and cast-off fixtures by a bulldozer; the packed earth around the wreckage seemed unwilling to yield any quarter to the roadside weeds seeking a foothold. With the senseless purpose peculiar to dreams, he found himself reaching into the tangle of crushed materials and extracting a worn, simple window frame fashioned of rough, uneven strips of poplar, empty of glass and stripped by time of any remnant of paint. He turned his back to a lowering sun and dropped the rectangle on the ground, framing his shadow from the waist up. He stood a moment, regarding the soft silhouette of his shade contained in the wooden box. Turning back to the shattered pile, he reached in, grasped a handle and wrenched a dented shovel from the mix. Following the choreography of his subconscious, he began to spear the shovel into the earth described by the worn window frame. Working carefully at the baked, dusty ground, he hacked a rectangular depression just inside the frame. His dream-mind offered up a forgotten song as he dug: 'Broken bodies, broken bones / broken voices on broken phones...' He dropped the shovel in the dust and settled down crosslegged in front of the hole. Bob Dylan's disinterested wail sang him down: 'Take a deep breath, feel like you're chokin' / everything is broken.' Rain began to fall into his dream; fat, oily drops that blackened the dirt around him and began to fill his shallow digging.
In the next moment, the rain stopped and he leaned over the reflecting pool in front of him. Dragging his fingers through the mud, he found a pebble and dropped it dead center into his unhealthy visage in the puddle, shattering himself into a fractal swirl. He shivered again and shook himself out of his uneasy sleep before his image settled back across the dark water.
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